Alphabet's winning bid of $10 million has secured the internal business data and software code of the now-defunct budget airline Spirit Airlines, outpacing a $7.5 million offer from AI training firm Mercor during a bankruptcy auction held in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The tech giant stated that this acquisition is expected to contribute to refining its products and artificial intelligence models, adding that all data obtained will be rigorously processed by third parties to eliminate any personally identifiable information.
Mercor, the losing bidder, acknowledged the value of such assets, noting that many companies hold decades of records that fully encapsulate how real businesses operate, and that Spirit Airlines' data represents a prime example of this value in the context of bankruptcy asset disposition. The transaction remains subject to approval at a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday, where an independent third party is expected to be appointed to oversee the removal of personal information from the dataset. According to sources familiar with the matter, the purchased data pertains exclusively to Spirit's internal corporate operations, excluding customer information and credit card-related details.
In recent months, a growing number of firms, including Mercor, have been aggressively bidding for corporate data from bankrupt or acquired companies. This includes Slack chat logs, GitHub and Asana platform contents, Google Docs files, and historical employee meeting records, all of which are being leveraged to train and run AI models. This surge in demand is driven by the increasing prevalence of AI agents, which can autonomously handle tasks such as technical customer support responses, clinical trial management, and invoice verification. Spirit Airlines, which ceased operations in May, laid off approximately 17,000 employees, and its employee emails and chat records were among the assets auctioned off in this process.
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